A quick visit to the country of the middle class at the Aldeburgh Food and Drink Festival

I never really gained the understanding of why I spent badly, because I reduced spending to achieve an externalised goal, leaving work early. Doing that projects all the energy into the how, rather than the why, and the how is easy – if you don’t need it, don’t buy it.The symptoms of excess consumerism weren’t terrible in my case either  -I didn’t borrow to buy consumer goods and managed to pay down my mortgage to the last £1000 after 20 years, even while spending like a typical consumer sucka[ref]You can still be a consumer sucka even if you live within your means and in budget. The symptoms are more subtle than mahoosive debt piling up all around you – you simply get to sell a bigger proportion of your life to The Man than you need to by working longer[/ref]. In comparison, for instance, blondeonabudget discovered some quite deep truths about why she was spending on consumer goods in a post about decluttering and another one about changing habits, rather than, say, discharging a decent wodge of consumer debt.

I just fought the symptoms so my experience is that once you’ve broken the habit, it doesn’t reoccur. Or maybe the YMOYL technique of qualifying how much work you have to do to pay for this gewgaw was enough. Certainly I can’t imagine any consumer goods being worth enough to me to consider working again to buy them! But I now have the privilege of standing on the outside looking in, rather than standing on the inside trying to imagine what being outside the consumerism bubble is like.

Food is a good place to investigate hedonic adaptation

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OTOH I do want to understand hedonic adaptation and perhaps use it right as I may make more frequent excursions to the country of greater hedonic spending, but this time living more intentionally. And yeah, it is a Rich People’s Problem just like the whole idea of early retirement is 😉

I believe I can derive much more enhancement of quality of life from spending a little bit on a wider range of experiences taking care to repeat infrequently. The trouble is doing that needs time and reflection – parameters I was short of while working, and I suspect a lot of products are sold in order to address a short-term problem without standing back and taking a systems approach – why am I having a problem with this? The regimented rhythm of the wage-slave’s year needs quick fixes now and is not conducive to introspection.

Introspection goes against how many things are marketed – of course company X wants you to consume as much of their stuff as possible, and things like subscriptions, bulk discounts and the like are incentives to do more of that. Food is, in many ways, a classic case – there is the short-term gustatory sensation and a longer-term feedback mechanism that you have had enough. To a first approximation in natural foods these are balanced within the range of human metabolism, but a lot of industrially produced foods are either lacking in parts or actively designed to be moreish[ref]often by the addition of umami flavourings, sugar and/or salt[/ref] so people wolf them down consuming more before the ‘I’ve had enough’ feedback loop kicks in. In Michael Pollan’s book In Defence Of Food[ref]I read Pollan’s book as a dead tree variant borrowed from the library. It’s of slight concern to me that apparently the e-version is Word-Wise enabled to explain the long words to the literately-challenged – it’s a book about food, FFS, not quantum physics or aetiology[/ref] , he boiled the solution of how to get this right into a few key statements –

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

 

• Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
• Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can’t pronounce.
• Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.

The latter is interesting – it’s quite disturbing how long supermarket tomatoes, bread and milk last now. If you think about it, you are a long tube deriving power from a controlled anaerobic rotting process going on inside you, this does seem to be running against the end use. [ref]Some packaging is there to counter aerobic decomposition – nitrogen purging, vacuum packing and the like which is probably okay.[/ref]

You’d do okay on Pollan’s criteria at the Aldeburgh Food festival 🙂 Now there is a materialist-rationalist counter to this.

Description is important, but no distinction should be sacred. Michael Pollan’s “real foods” are like Sarah Palin’s “real americans”. It’s good to have standards, and tastes, but labels can be problematic. More practically, our old foods can’t really compete today. They are too expensive, inconvenient, and bland for most consumers. If we want people to be healthier we’re going to have to beat fast food at its own game.

The general approach is to establish that it takes about 3kWh to run a human being for a day [ref]at 2,500 kCal daily and converting to kWh – it surprised me that a human being is a greater power drain than a fridge-freezer[/ref] and while we await science delivering us a mechanism whereby we can just plug ourselves into the wall socket to recharge overnight[ref]In fairness to Rhinehart of Soylent fame, he doesn’t really approve of AC current either, alleging the US power grid to be about 25% efficient[/ref], there is a technically decent interim solution called Soylent (hopefully not yet available in green) – from its creator

For its nutrition Soylent 2.0 is perhaps the most ecologically efficient food ever created. You may think me smug but I and many other people have poured their lives into creating something amazing and we have every right to be proud of it.

For all I know in the megacities of the future there will be a highly interconnected system with some equivalent of Soylent piped in the same way as we run water and gas. That’s for future generations to sort out if this is what being human means. The falling resilience of such interconnected systems also worries me, in the same way as if some clever computer virus corrupted the Internet infrastructure I am not sure we would have the communications or skills left to black start it from a sea of disconnected islands.

I’m with Pollan here. I can live with the irrationality of old-fashioned eating for the better ride, although if I were a student I might investigate Soylent as a way to save money and stop flatmates pinching my food from the fridge 😉

Not everything about hedonic adaptation involves spending money. Many commercially grown foods either never had any taste to start with[ref]plants used to work in symbiosis with microbial action in the soil to make nutrients plant-available. As we switched to industrial farming from the 1950s to 1970s this changed, since industrial farming doesn’t bother with that, adding macronutrients as salts to the soil, replacing and indeed impairing the microbial action. Coincidentally the mineral content of our fruit and veg has been falling ever since the 1950s, as shown by the longitudinal food compositions studies of McCance and Widdowson eg this paper [/ref]or the taste fades rapidly down the long supply chains – sweetcorn for instance fades in flavour after half an hour, never mind the two days Tesco think of as fresh. Take strawberries, for instance – they use to taste of something in the 1970s but I don’t bother with them any more because while they look much better now than they used to they taste of very little. However, I could adapt to this by growing them. Growing things helps with the hedonic adaptation along the time axis too – it’s called eating with the seasons.

 

Snape Maltings on a sunny Suffolk day

I was reminded of this when  went to the Aldeburgh Food and Drink Festival, to take a look around what people are doing, pick up some ideas about how the middle class[ref]there was a fair range of people there, but let’s face it, we are talking middle class in the Daily Telegraph sense of the word rather than the logical US version of the term[/ref] think about food, because I have an interest in an operation that occasionally sells to this demographic, and, what the heck, it was a nice day.I managed to avoid paying the £8 full price too, because I was too tight for that[ref]Mrs Ermine subsidised the ticket in return for the ride there of about 40 mi round-trip, I didn’t jump over the fence[/ref]. We went early on Sunday, and it’s a shame I didn’t get into the groove fast enough to record some of the crowd hubbub, there were certainly a lot of very posh accents early on 🙂

The food looked and smelled good, and it was interesting to observe the wide range of stuff you can grow in a sunny eastern outpost of Britain – and it doesn’t have to all look like fields of ripening grain.

Sutton Hoo chickens – they do taste better than industrial chicken, though they tend to be on the large side for two people

A lot of this was about the story as much as the product. Now in a country where we’ve been eating horsemeat masquerading as beef for long stretches of time this is no bad thing, and indeed the story of a lot of factory farming is rarely told because it’s nasty. But it reminds me that an awful lot of consumerism is about the story – and when you’re dealing with food then the adman’s admonition to “sell the sizzle, not the steak” is particularly stark

Tim Hayward selling the sizzle – he has a book out, but this is a pretty nice example of flambe in action

There’s an interesting observation that the reasons you don’t buy something can be broken down into

People’s objections to a purchase can essentially be narrowed down into 4 main groupings: No need, No time, No money, No trust.

The aim of getting better at personal finance through spending less is to shift the baseline in the no need and no trust axes a long way off most consumers’ settings. I got out of the show without buying anything, though I did consume a few items. But I did enjoy listening to the stories – it is possible to break the link between the story and the action. I went as flâneur – to people-watch, to observe, and yes, to enjoy a few stories. There is entertainment to be had in some retail spaces and trade fairs without having to buy anything 🙂

In fairness I should add that I was treated to a coffee and half of this fine platter from Lane Farm by Mrs Ermine who was doing some networking here.

some of Lane Farm’s fine salami

I went along for the ride, and also to go as a tourist to the Land of Middle Class and their fancy ways. Some of them do add to a better experience, and I am considering what I will change when I get hold of my own pension money. I’m not totally averse to some food frippery – I armed myself with some Lane Farms salami earlier this year when I went on a week-long course at a joint where the catering was vegetarian from a lowest-common-denominator angle rather than a moral stance[ref]in contrast some places are vegan from a religious or ethical stance, and it would be rude to abuse their hospitality by consuming meat there – and after all there are taxis and towns with restaurants ;)[/ref]. And I opined that paying £600 on one restaurant meal was perhaps a better thing to do than get a year’s worth of weekly Mickey D’s in the hedonism department.

Fennel – looks gorgeous but tastes dire IMO, and I’m not that keen on the smell, either

And here is  a different approach to frugality – you do not have to use a consumer product, service or experience for its intended purpose. One of the joys of retirement is watching other people and learning about new things. I’m not going to use any of the things I learned here – among others I learned that older beef apparently tastes better, that it is possible to put fennel in a dish and not have it taste revolting  – Tim Hayward managed. It’s a funny old world, and sometimes it’s just good to lend an ear to an interesting narrative told by a fellow who can spin a good yarn. Hayward introduced me to the concept of the bum sandwich, another snippet of information I’ll never use but slightly enriched my life.

I was tickled by Tim Hayward’s apparent surprise that there are people from Cambridge who have weekend retreats on the Suffolk coast. The coast gets some of its charm by the very fact that communications start to thin out as the A12 ceases being a dual carriageway after Wickham Market. There’s no big source of real employment for ordinary people, it’s too far from London and Cambridge to commute, so tourism and vacation homes are going to abound. I confess I had my Hayward moment when I spied this stall

Handmade treats for your hound from a truly Artisan bakery, Patisserie and Chocolatier. You read it here first!

It’s good to know that there’s still a lot of money about, though it’s perhaps not so good to know that people’s brains fall out into such a big wet mess on the floor when it comes to anthropomorphising their precious hounds.

Luxury hand made dog treats

It’s just so wrong, in so many ways. When you see a dog eating, it’s utilitarian snarfing, not for nothing is it called wolfing something down. You can get pink “Good Girl” chocolates[ref]There probably needs to be a public health warning here that normal chocolate contains theobromine, which humans can metabolise but dogs can’t, so don’t go slinging your hound a box of Milk Tray to save £11[/ref] or blue “Good Boy” ones at 145g for £10.80. These are marketed to the emotional needs of the owner rather than the nutritional needs of the mutt, because dogs have dichromatic vision with no red-green discrimination, they don’t have the long cultural tradition of pink for she and blue for he, and 145g of stuff ain’t gonna touch the flippin’ sides, guys! But good luck to Barkers, if they can turn such muppetry into a profit.

I enjoyed my package tour to the Land of the Middle Class – travel broadens the mind, and you can travel in many more ways than distance.